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User blog:Concernedalien11780/Hello, Heropedia...
Hello Heropedia, this is Concernedalien11780. As a lifelong fan of the original Bionicle series, I was somewhat bothered by the idea that its replacement after a rushed finale would be a considerably lighter and softer story that, in its initial teaser trailer in 2010, tried to come off as high-brow. Fortunately, when Hero Factory actually did come out, I realized that it wasn't that bad. Certainly not as good as Bionicle, but still not too bad as far as kids' toy-centered science-fiction action stories are concerned. I only got a few sets, however, because I was fourteen when it came out, my interest in getting Lego sets to actually properly play with and build original designs with them was dwindling, and I was at a boarding school when Hero Factory 3.0 came out and never cared to get back into it at any point after that. The only figures I got were of Xplode, Rotor, Mark Surge, and Surge 2.0. Being a fan of Pokemon for quite some time, I found the 2.0 storyline to be odd for the fact that the villains were all fire-based and the heroes fought them with ice weapons. How does Pokemon play into all of this? Because when it comes to Pokemon type matchups, Fire-type moves beat Ice-type Pokemon because fire melts ice, and Water-type moves beat Fire-type Pokemon because water puts out fire. So why would the heroes use ice weapons to fight fire villains? Just doesn't seem like it would work. I don't quite appreciate them taking the title of Fire Lord from Avatar: The Last Airbender and turning the title into that of the generic Big Bad of that part of the Hero Factory story, either. When I was older than that and the Hero Factory line was replaced by a Bionicle reboot, I then thought of an even darker belief on the nature of the Hero Factory world, somewhat similar to, but still generally far from, some of the adult theories on The Smurfs and the extremely disturbing social dynamics of that world, but not in the exact same ways. In the world of Hero Factory, you can only be a hero if you are a Hero- meaning a part of the robotic "species" that is Heroes. Does that mean that everyone else in Makuhero City is a Villain- meaning scary-looking and likely to commit crimes? What about robots that are not Heroes built at Hero Factory but don't look like any of the Villains? Do they all just get victimized by the Villains and need to be saved by the Heroes? What if one of them were to try to be a hero or a villain, despite not being built at Hero Factory nor looking like a scary Villain? And what about Akiyama Makuro himself? How was he created, and how did he get an entire city named for a pormanteu of his last name and his business? This all seems to have some pretty unfortunate implications, and is probably barely justified by the fact that the characters are all robots in a quasi-futuristic city and not humans. It's almost like if all of the heroes in something were one race and all of the villains were another race. I usually try to avoid reading into such things in media works, but I might say something if I notice something that it doesn't seem like anyone else has, as it would seem with Hero Factory. And yes, as shown by the story of Von Ness/Von Nebula, Heroes can become Villains if they commit acts of cowardice and run from a more-dangerous-than-usual fight because of their fear of getting themselves hurt and/or killed, then gain control of a black hole staff, blame others for your mistakes, and try to get revenge for the fun of it. Unfortunately, even things like that seem underdeveloped. Preston Stormer blames himself for Von Ness's betrayal, even though Preston did nothing wrong. Why do people give characters in the stories they write angst for no reason? And why does Von Ness blame Preston? Because he can't handle when good karma affects those who do the right thing and when bad karma affects those who don't? It would be nice if we got more insight as to why Von Ness went bad then simply Lego needing a quasi-sob story to make kids think they know what emotional investment is. And perhaps Makuro shouldn't have put the word "Von" in the name of one of the heroes he builds? Names like that tend to guarantee that someone with the name will go bad, Vanellopie von Schweetz from Disney's Wreck-It Ralph being a notable exception (depending on your opinions of Sarah Silverman). Fortunately, I recently learned about how midway through Hero Factory's lifespan, Greg Farshtey, the man who streamlined all things Bionicle, defined the story's overall tone, and proved that Bionicle is really not very kid-friendly outside of the toys (the blogs, story serials, and podcasts that used to be on Bioniclestory.com before the website's removal and are now on the Bionicle wiki are probably the most violent stories ever told under the Lego label), came along and saved the Hero Factory franchise from itself. While I never read any of the Hero Factory Secret Mission books, I've heard good things about them on TV Tropes and am glad that Greg tries to get into a Hero's psyche in the stories, explaining possible factors as to why a hero or a Hero might become a villain or a Villain and what a Hero should do to be a HERO (saying hero in all caps is my way of saying the original all-lowercase hero, meaning someone that does good for others rather than the robot species title of Hero, but with more emphasis). If I end up doing more in this fandom, I may try to read those stories. Thanks to the apparent underdevelopment of this wiki since even before the cancellation of Hero Factory, this wiki is one of the many wikis I'll put on my "more strongly worth considering spending time on" list, taken from an older list of 142 wikis relating to things I like and is to be shortened after finishing my near-over quest of writing blog posts on all of the wikis on that list of mine that allow for blog posts and afterwards looking at which wikis could use some work, which ones people respond to me on, which ones fall into another pattern I made on the list, and which things are similar to the first thing chosen with that older pattern. I disabled comments because of my paranoia about flame wars, so if you want to talk to me about anything I said in this post or anything else relating to Hero Factory, please message me on the chat section of my userpage. Thank you for reading, and I'll see you on the wiki. Category:Blog posts Category:Blog posts